by Elysa Gardner, USA TODAY

by Elysa Gardner, USA TODAY

NEW YORK - "Ma'am, is it all right if I start a fire?" asks Hal Carter, the handsome young drifter in William Inge's Picnic, while doing chores for an older woman.

It's a rhetorical question, at least in the figurative sense; for Hal, having wandered into a small, sleepy Kansas town just in time for its Labor Day festivities, already has lit a match under the lonely ladies who occupy the yard shared by the aforementioned Helen Potts and Flo Owens, a middle-aged single mom. Mrs. Potts, who lives with her elderly mother, is clearly titillated, as are Rosemary Sydney, the spinster schoolteacher boarding with Flo, and both of Flo's teenage daughters.

And who can blame them? Hal spends a good chunk of the first act shirtless; and in the Roundabout Theatre Company's new revival, which opened Sunday at the American Airlines Theatre, leading man Sebastian Stan struts around with his flesh glistening as if he'd been oiling it all day.

Suffice it to say that this production, directed by Sam Gold, doesn't take pains to camouflage the Pulitzer Prize-winning play's dated qualities. Sixty years after Picnic was first staged, the idea that a guy who, frankly, comes across as a brawny blowhard could awaken a bunch of old and young maids to their womanly needs seems, to put it charitably, a bit quaint.

But there is ultimately more to Hal, and his appeal, than appearances suggest; and Gold and his supple cast mine the conflicting, often repressed passions of these Midwestern folk without demeaning them.

The company includes a number of esteemed veterans, from Ellen Burstyn to New York stage favorites Reed Birney and Elizabeth Marvel. But the younger players are similarly impressive, particularly Maggie Grace, making a lovely Broadway debut as Flo's elder girl, Madge, the town babe and the steady of Hal's more privileged, settled college friend.

As Hal and Madge fall reluctantly but furiously for each other, Grace and Stan capture the frenzied enchantment, hope and fear of young lovers living in a certain era, under certain socioeconomic circumstances. As Hal recognizes the longing under Madge's beauty, Grace manages an emotional delicacy and transparency that make their scenes as bittersweet as they are sultry.

Madeleine Martin turns in a piquant, touching performance as Millie, Madge's sassier, brainier little sister, who, like her sibling, yearns to be admired for more than just her most obvious assets. Mare Winningham's weary, wary Flo and Burstyn's rosy Mrs. Potts prove fine foils as women who have wound up on their own for very different reasons, and thus react to Hal very differently.

Marvel is a more fervid presence as Rosemary, whose air of cavalier independence masks a growing desperation that explodes after a night with her businessman beau, Birney's droll but tender Howard Bevans. Rosemary envisions, terrified, a time when "there's no one left to care for me, whether I'm nice to him or not."

If such lamentations show Picnic's age, the play's more general emphasis on the power of connection and acceptance still resonates.